POLL: Signing up to a sponsor program...
 

1) do you make contact with the program first to see if they have what you need
2) signup first and ask questions later
3) signup out of curiosity
4) signup and wait for someone to contact you
5) signup only after having done your research (no contact) & have traffic ready to go

If you can elaborate on your responses - I'd appreciate that.

My other question is what motivates you to signup, get links, put them up IMMEDIATELY - rather than tossing to the side until you have time to come back to it again?

Does signing up during your night or morning have any influence on when you put your links up?

The program has to match with what I'm looking for obviously +
having FHG with good descriptions
RSS Feeds with a nice thumb, good text & that obviously will work with the blog. This means I can get my personal traffic to it.

I like being able to dump the info in a txt file with all that I need.

Signing up during the night usually means I have no patience for 'looking' for stuff and 95% of the time, it gets tossed to the side for a few weeks/months. :(

How about you? :)

No affiliates/webmasters on friday morning?

I just signup and put the links on my sites. If i don't like to hosted galleries ( 70% of the time ), i ask an affiliate program to give me access to the members area and make the galleries by myself.

Cool - so 70% of the time, the FHG aren't to your liking?
Is it a matter of content quality on FHG that doesn't appeal to you/your surfers or design?

**assuming that the content in the members area is better**

Most of the affiliate program owners don't have any knowledge in the tgp business.

For example, they will put small thumbs in a video hosted galleries. So how can the mgps with big thumbs do then to have quality preview thumbs?

Another example is they put bad quality screened caps on photos hosted galleries. I usually don't use those kind of gallery.

Eventually some hosted galleries have thumbs linking to the paysites and other things wich doesnt get in line with the tgp rules.

Bump Patricia, good thread and inquiries.

I hear ya on most points - I think somewhere along the line, there should be a straight set of rules that programs should follow. I mean, everyone wants to be 'different' but they can do that with text - there should be a general set of rules that everyone follows. It will benefit the program (when affiliates signup, they can actually get your links & upload them FAST which = instant traffic) and most certainly benefit affiliates in terms of getting their task done.

Some will disagree and say that it's 'demanding' too much - but you're already investing the money to make galleries that they can't 'all' use - may as well invest time and fix the issues to be compliant with 90% of TGP/MGP standards, right?

Thanks PornMySex - I appreciate the responses!

Thanks LauraLee - I'm sure all programs would love for each affiliate signup to = to instant traffic. Putting myself in their shoes doesn't always work! ;)

Need more responses people :)

I need to know I have traffic to convert. Or possibly they have a site that looks like if I built traffic to it would convert.

Generally I like to build my own galleries and other stuff from the content. Most the time 80% of the hosted galleries just don't convert for me. Actually I should say custom stuff converts at a much higher rate than just using the free hosted stuff. Don't get me wrong it has it's place for hack n slash sites/networks.

Cheers,
B

Cool bDok - I'm assuming you're both a TGP/MGP owner & a submitter. Do you have any blogs/free sites-linklists?

Are you looking primarily for TGP/MGP tools and the rest you build manually?

For smaller programs, like a single CCBILL site I usually contact the site owner and ask for members area access.. both to see if it's worth it .. and to get promotion content

For larger programs .. like ND, TB etc etc. I usually just sign up and start promoting.. they usually already got what I need in their webmaster area..

And I really really really do prefer programs which doesn't host and "create" the stats themselfs

What do you mean by 'host & create' the stats themselves?

You prefer CCBill sponsors?

some programs i signup too, but when i have a look at the materials, the quality of the stuff, then i dont even bother.

The quality of their tools don't fit your needs? Do the actual sites, in terms of design and content appeal to you? (just wondering if what you're saying is that they put second grade stuff on their tools but have it right in terms of the content/tours)

A little bump to elaborate on some of the responses.

BTW - thanks for engaging in this - it's helping out a few programs & reps I'm sure.

Bump this one again !

Good thread :)

Thanks :) Remind me that Fridays are a HORRIBLE day to start biz thread - WTF was I thinking? LMAO

Maybe on Saturday I'll have better response? :)

mix of everything, poorly designed banners, tours, etc.

Thanks Fris - just to clarify, you don't bother contacting them either ?

(perhaps you can get access to their members area & do it yourself - or let them know that you can't promote with that quality - so when enough affiliates let them know they realize that they need to improve on their tools?)

Also - Monday morning bump, maybe I'll get more responses :)

Bump for the biz crowd now that things quieted down a little :)

Normally i sign-up and ask questions later. Most of the time, the proggies have most with that i ask for. If not, I will hit them up.

I have been checking many of the renowned (and advertised) programs and I was usually very satisfied with the amount of promos and internal infrastructure etc. Just what I always missed was kind of human touch, someone to introduce you to what works, what would suit you etc.

Sure if you have 20 000 affiliates you can't chat with everyone all the time.

But it's something i would like to work on on our affiliate program... having the personal touch and also getting the affiliates work with each other on promotions..

I always sign up with the intention of promoting a site on my blogs, but often I get in there and find that they don't have the tools or they rarely update. There was a great BDSM sponsor I found last year that looked super on the surface but once I got at it I found they updated like once every six months. That's just not going to work, so I walked away.

I agree - one of the issues with programs is maintaining tools. Perhaps adding an 'updates every week' - or 'no longer updated'.

With the blog stuff - I feel your pain. It's irritating to add a site feed that once you've pulled the feed, you don't see another post for a few weeks or a month or even worse, no update altogether.

I guess because 95% of the sponsors have structured the blogs to list the same galleries on the same domain as their FHG. Because of this - it's hard to distinguish and track the amount of sales coming from the actual blog links (unless affiliates are using easily distinguishable tracking/campaign codes). What they see is that their FHGs incoming traffic has increased but they probably chalk it to new TGPS/MGPS listing them.

It's sad because the conversions with blogs are worth the effort and if done properly, the volume of traffic will come.

Patrizia interesting results, lots of curious people...

Exactly :)